How to use Git and Dropbox together

Question

Is it possible to use Git and Dropbox together

User · Answer

I ve been using Mercurial in the recommended manner and urge that you be cautious  especially if any of the machines differ  The Dropbox fora are full of complaints of mysterious filename case problems turning up spontaneously  Hg  and I presume Git  won t notice or complain during routine checkins and you ll only hear about the corruption when it complains of a corrupt repo when you try to use it for real  Bad news  Wish I could be more specific about the problem and its workarounds  I m still trying to dig out from this mess myself

User · Answer

I store my non-Github repo s on Dropbox   One caveat I ran into was syncing after a reinstall   Dropbox will download the smallest files first before moving to the larger ones   Not an issue if you start at night and come back after the weekend  -   My thread - http   forums dropbox com topic php id 29984 amp replies 6

User · Answer

There s also an open source project  a collection of cross platform  Linux  Mac  Win  scripts  that does all the nitty-gritty details of the repository management with a handful  3-4  of commands   https   github com karalabe gitbox wiki  Sample usage is     gitbox create myapp Creating empty repository    Initializing new repository    Repository successfully created     gitbox clone myapp Cloning repository    Repository successfully cloned    After which normal git usage     echo    Some change     gt  somefile txt   git add somefile txt   git commit    m    Created some file      git push   Check the project wiki and the manuals for full command reference and tutorials

User · Answer

Now in 2014  I have been using Git and Dropbox for about one year and a half without problem  Some points though    All my machines using Dropbox are on Windows  different versions  7 to 8    1 mac  I do not share the repository with someone else  so I am the only one to modify it  git push pushes to a remote repository  so that if it ever gets corrupted  I can easily recover it  I had to create aliases in C  Users with mklink  D link target because some libraries were pointed to absolute locations

User · Answer

The right way to do this is use git-remote-dropbox  https   github com anishathalye git-remote-dropbox  Creating your own bare repo in Dropbox causes a lot of problems  Anish  the creator of the library  explains it best      The root cause of these problems is that the Dropbox desktop   client is designed for syncing files  not Git repositories  Without   special handling for Git repositories  it doesn   t maintain the same   guarantees as Git  Operations on the remote repository are no longer   atomic  and concurrent operations or unlucky timing with   synchronization can result in a corrupted repository       Traditional Git remotes run code on the server side to make this work   properly  but we can   t do that       Solution  It is possible to solve this properly  It is possible to use   Git with Dropbox and have the same safety and consistency guarantees   as a traditional Git remote  even when there are multiple users and   concurrent operations       For a user  it   s as simple as using git-remote-dropbox  a Git remote   helper that acts as a transparent bidirectional bridge between Git and   Dropbox and maintains all the guarantees of a traditional Git remote    It   s even safe to use with shared folders  so it can be used for   collaboration  yay unlimited private repos with unlimited   collaborators         With the remote helper  it   s possible to use Dropbox as a Git remote   and continue using all the regular Git commands like git clone  git   pull  and git push  and everything will just work as expected

User · Answer

It is now 2015  and as of three days ago  a new tool based on Dropbox API v2 has been created to safely use git on Dropbox  It works against the API rather than using the desktop client  and correctly handles multiple simultaneous pushes to a repository hosted in a shared folder    Once configured  it allows one to set up a git remote exactly like any other git remote   git clone  dropbox   path to repo  git remote add origin  dropbox   path to repo

User · Answer

With regards to small teams using Dropbox   If each developer has their own writable bare repository on Dropbox  which is pull only to other developers  then this facilitates code sharing with no risk of corruption   Then if you want a centralized  mainline   you can have one developer manage all the pushes to it from their own repo

User · Answer

I have faced a similar issue and have created a small script for the same  The idea is to use Dropbox with Git as simply as possible  Currently  I have quickly implemented Ruby code  and I will soon add more    The script is accessible at https   github com nuttylabs box-git

User · Answer

We use this method  creating a bare repository in Dropbox  on a share folder    A small group of developers can pull from that bare synced repository and create a local clone  Once the unit of work is done  we push back to origin   One thing I m missing is a good way to have an e-mail sent with the change-set information once a push to origin occurs  We are using Google Wave to manually keep track of changes

User · Answer

Another approach   All the answers so far  including  Dan answer which is the most popular  address the idea of using Dropbox to centralize a shared repository instead of using a service focused on git like github  bitbucket  etc    But  as the original question does not specify what using  Git and Dropbox together effectively  really means  let s work on another approach    Using Dropbox to sync only the worktree    The how-to has these steps     inside the project directory  one creates an empty  git directory  e g  mkdir -p myproject  git  un-sync the  git directory in Dropbox  If using the Dropbox App  go to Preferences  Sync  and  choose folders to sync   where the  git directory needs to get unmarked  This will remove the  git directory  run git init in the project directory   It also works if the  git already exists  then only do the step 2  Dropbox will keep a copy of the git files in the website though   Step 2 will cause Dropbox not to sync the git system structure  which is the desired outcome for this approach    Why one would use this approach    The not-yet-pushed changes will have a Dropbox backup  and they would be synced across devices  In case Dropbox screws something up when syncing between devices  git status and git diff will be handy to sort things out  It saves space in the Dropbox account  the whole history will not be stored there  It avoids the concerns raised by  dubek and  Ates in the comments on  Dan s answer  and the concerns by  clu in another answer    The existence of a remote somewhere else  github  etc   will work fine with this approach   Working on different branches brings some issues  that need to be taken care of    One potential problem is having Dropbox  unnecessarily   syncing potentially many files when one checks out different branches   If two or more Dropbox synced devices have different branches checked out  non committed changes to both devices can be lost    One way around these issues is to use git worktree to keep branch checkouts in separate directories

User · Answer

I think that Git on Dropbox is great  I use it all the time  I have multiple computers  two at home and one at work  on which I use Dropbox as a central bare repository  Since I don   t want to host it on a public service  and I don   t have access to a server that I can always SSH to  Dropbox takes care of this by syncing in the background  very doing so quickly   Setup is something like this    project   git init   project   git add     project   git commit -m  quot first commit quot    project   cd   Dropbox git    Dropbox git   git init --bare project git   Dropbox git   cd   project    project   git remote add origin   Dropbox git project git   project   git push -u origin master  From there  you can just clone that   Dropbox git project git directory  regardless of whether it belongs to your Dropbox account or is shared across multiple accounts  and do all the normal Git operations   they will be synchronized to all your other machines automatically  I wrote a blog post    On Version Control    in which I cover the reasoning behind my environment setup  It   s based on my Ruby on Rails development experience  but it can be applied to anything  really

User · Answer

I don t think that using Git and Dropbox is the way to go    Just think about the features of both   Git    Allows you to have a central repository Allows you to have your own repository with your own changes Allows you to send and receive changes from the central repository Allows multiple persons to change the same files and them merges them or asks you to merge them if it can t do it Has web and desktop clients to allow access to the central repository   Dropbox    Keeps everything in a central repository Allows you to have your own versions of the files in the server Forces you to send and receive changes from the central repository If multiple persons change the same files  the first file committed is replaced with later commits  and no merge occurs which is troublesome  and definitely its biggest disadvantage   Has web and desktop clients to allow access to the central repository    And if you re worried with sharing some of your files  why not cipher them  And then you could get the biggest advantage of Dropbox to Git  that is  to have public and private files

User · Answer

This answer is based on Mercurial experience  not Git  but this experience says using Dropbox this way is asking for corrupt repositories if there s even a chance that you ll be updating the same Dropbox-based repository from different machines at various times  Mac  Unix  Windows in my case    I don t have a complete list of the things that can go wrong  but here s a specific example that bit me  Each machine has its own notion of line-ending characters and how upper lower case characters are handled in file names  Dropbox and Git Mercurial handle this slightly differently  I don t recall the exact differences   If Dropbox updates the repository behind Git Mercurial s back  presto  broken repository  This happens immediately and invisibly  so you don t even know your repository is broken until you try to recover something from it   After digging out from one mess doing things this way  I ve been using the following recipe with great success and no sign of problems  Simply move your repository out of Dropbox  Use Dropbox for everything else  documentation  JAR files  anything you please  And use GitHub  Git  or Bitbucket  Mercurial  to manage the repository itself  Both are free so this adds nothing to the costs  and each tool now plays to its strengths    Running Git Mercurial on top of Dropbox adds nothing except risk  Don t do it

User · Answer

For my 2 cents Dropbox only makes sence for personal use where you don t want to bother getting a central repo host  For any professional development you ll probably create more problems than you ll solve  as have been mentioned several times in the thread already  Dropbox isn t designed for this use case  That said  a perfectly safe method to dump repositories on Dropbox without any third-party plugins or tools is to use bundles  I have the following aliases in my  gitconfig to save typing    alias          bundle-push     cd     GIT PREFIX -      amp  amp  if path     git config remote    1   url     amp  amp        path 0 1           then git bundle create    path   --all  amp  amp  git fetch    1    else echo   Not a bundle remote    exit 1  fi            bundle-fetch     cd     GIT PREFIX -      amp  amp  if path     git config remote    1   url     amp  amp        path 0 1           then git bundle verify    path    amp  amp  git fetch    1    else echo   Not a bundle remote    exit 1  fi            bundle-new     cd     GIT PREFIX -      amp  amp  if   -z     1 -    -o -z     2 -       then echo   Usage  git bundle-new  lt file gt   lt remote name gt     exit 1  elif   -e    2      then echo   File exist    exit 1  else git bundle create    2   --all  amp  amp  git remote add -f    1       realpath    2       fi      Example     Create bundle remote  in local repo    git bundle-new dropbox   Dropbox my-repo bundle   Fetch updates from dropbox   git bundle-fetch dropbox   NOTE  writes over previous bundle  Thus  roughly equivalent to push --force --prune --all   git bundle-push

User · Answer

I didn t want to put all my projects under one Git repository  nor did I want to go in and run this code for every single project  so I made a Bash script that will automate the process  You can use it on one or multiple directories - so it can do the code in this post for you or it can do it on multiple projects at once      bin sh   Script by Eli Delventhal   Creates Git projects for file folders by making the origin Dropbox  You will need to install Dropbox for this to work     Not enough parameters  show help  if      -lt 1     then  cat lt  lt HELP projects to git sh -- Takes a project folder and creates a Git repository for it on Dropbox  USAGE        projects to git sh file1 file2     EXAMPLES        projects to git sh path to MyProjectDir         Creates a git project called MyProjectDir on Dropbox        projects to git sh path to workspace           Creates a git project on Dropbox for every folder contained within the workspace directory  where the project name matches the folder name  HELP     exit 0 fi    We have enough parameters  so let s actually do this thing   START DIR   pwd     Make sure we have a connection to Dropbox cd   if   -s  Dropbox      then     echo  Found Dropbox directory       cd Dropbox     if   -s  git      then         echo      Dropbox Git directory found       else         echo      Dropbox Git directory created           mkdir git     fi else     echo  You do not have a Dropbox folder at   Dropbox  Install Dropbox  Aborting         exit 0 fi    Process all directories matching the passed parameters  echo  Starting processing for all files     for PROJ in    do     if   -d  PROJ     then         PROJNAME   basename  PROJ          echo    Processing  PROJNAME                Enable Git with this project          cd  PROJ         if   -s   git      then             echo       PROJNAME is already a Git repository  ignoring             else             echo      Initializing Git for  PROJNAME                 git init -q             git add               git commit -m  Initial creation of project   -q                Make the origin Dropbox               cd   Dropbox git             if   -s  PROJNAME     then                 echo      Warning   PROJNAME already exists in Git  Ignoring                 else                 echo      Putting  PROJNAME project on Dropbox                     mkdir  PROJNAME                 cd  PROJNAME                 git init -q --bare             fi                Link the project to the origin             echo      Copying local  PROJNAME to Dropbox                 cd  PROJ             git remote add origin    Dropbox git  PROJNAME              git push -q origin master             git branch --set-upstream master origin master         fi     fi done  echo  Done processing all files   cd  START DIR

User · Answer

I use Mercurial  or Git    TrueCrypt   Dropbox for encrypted remote backups   The coolest thing is that Dropbox does NOT sync the entire TrueCrypt container if you modify a small portion of your code  The sync time is roughly proportional to the amount of changes  Even though it s encrypted  the combination of TrueCrypt   Dropbox makes excellent usage of block cipher   block level sync   Secondly  a monolithic encrypted container not just adds security  it also reduces chances of repository corruption     Caution  However you have to be very careful about not having the container mounted while Dropbox is running  It can also be a pain to resolve conflicts if 2 different clients check-in different versions to the container  So  it s practical only for a single person using it for backups  not for a team   Setup    Create a Truecrypt container  multiple Gigabyte is fine  Under Truecrypt preferences  uncheck preserve modification timestamp    Create a repo as mentioned above by Dan   https   stackoverflow com a 1961515 781695     Usage    Quit Dropbox Mount the container  push your changes  unmount Run dropbox   P S  Unchecking the preserve modification timestamp tells dropbox that the file has been modified and it should be sync d  Note that mounting the container modifies the timestamp even if you don t change any file in it  If you don t want that to happen  simply mount the volume as read-only

User · Answer

Without using third-party integration tools  I could enhance the condition a bit and use DropBox and other similar cloud disk services such as SpiderOak with Git   The goal is to avoid the synchronization in the middle of these files modifications  as it can upload a partial state and will then download it back  completely corrupting your git state   To avoid this issue  I did    Bundle my git index in one file using git bundle create my repo git --all  Set a delay for the file monitoring  eg 5 minutes  instead of instantaneous  This reduces the chances DropBox synchronizes a partial state in the middle of a change  It also helps greatly when modifying files on the cloud disk on-the-fly  such as with instantaneous saving note-taking apps     It s not perfect as there is no guarantee it won t mess up the git state again  but it helps and for the moment I did not get any issue

User · Answer

On MacOS you may also just stop Dropbox  make your changes and then relaunch Dropbox  I am using the following combination and am quite happy with it   In both  your local git managed project directory and your remote git repository located on Dropbox  run the following command to disable auto-packing  which is the main problem with dropbox syncing   git config --global gc auto 0   Then from time to time  compress the repositories with dropbox disabled  For example I do the following in my bash-build-script whenever I make new releases of my apps   osascript -e  tell application   Dropbox   to quit     Compress local git gc --prune now  git repack -a -d    Compress remote REPOS DIR REMOTE  git remote get-url --push origin  cd    REPOS DIR REMOTE   git gc --prune now  git repack -a -d  osascript -e  tell application   Dropbox   to launch  osascript -e  display notification with title   Compress Done

User · Answer

I like the top-voted answer by Dan McNevin  I ended up doing the sequence of git commands too many times and decided to make a script  So here it is      bin bash    Usage usage         echo  Usage    0  -m   master-branch-directory   -r   remote-branch-directory     project-name        exit 1      Defaults defaults         masterdir    HOME  Dropbox git      remotedir    PWD       gitignorefile    OS generated files   n n DS Store n DS Store  n Spotlight-V100 n Trashes nehthumbs db nThumbs db       Check if no arguments if        -eq 0     then     echo  Error  No arguments specified      usage fi   Set defaults defaults    Parse arguments while        -ge 1    do     case    1   in          -h     --help    usage             -m                shift             masterdir    1                           -r                shift             remotedir    1                                          projectname    1                   projectname    projectname  git  git                     esac     shift done    check if specified directories and project name exists if   -z    projectname      then     echo  Error  Project name not specified      usage fi  if     -d    remotedir      then     echo  Error  Remote directory   remotedir  does not exist      usage fi  if     -d    masterdir      then     echo  Error  Master directory   masterdir  does not exist      usage fi   absolute paths remotedir     cd     remotedir     amp  amp  pwd     masterdir     cd     masterdir     amp  amp  pwd       Make master git repository cd    masterdir   git init --bare    projectname     make local repository and push to master cd    remotedir   echo -e    gitignorefile    gt   gitignore   default  gitignore file git init git add   git commit -m  first commit  git remote add origin    masterdir    projectname   git push -u origin master   done echo  ----- Locations -----  echo  Remote branch location    remotedir   echo  Master branch location    masterdir   echo  Project Name    projectname     The script only requires a project name  It will generate a git repository in   Dropbox git  under the specified name and will push the entire contents of the current directory to the newly created origin master branch  If more than one project name is given  the right-most project name argument will be used    Optionally  the -r command argument specifies the remote branch that will push to the origin master  The location of the project origin master can also be specified with the -m argument  A default  gitignore file is also placed in the remote branch directory  The directory and  gitignore file defaults are specified in the script

User · Answer

I love the answer by Dan McNevin  I m using Git and Dropbox together too now  and I m using several aliases in my  bash profile so my workflow looks like this     project   git init   project   git add     project   gcam  first commit    project   git-dropbox   These are my aliases   alias gcam  git commit -a -m  alias gpom  git push origin master  alias gra  git remote add origin  alias git-dropbox  TMPGP   Dropbox git   pwd   awk -F       print  NF       git mkdir -p  TMPGP  amp  amp   cd  TMPGP  git init --bare   amp  amp  gra  TMPGP  amp  amp  gpom

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